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The Open Source Promise

Sandro Groganz 3 Comments

Panel I attended the panel discussion entitled “The Open Source Promise” at Red Herring Spring 2007 yesterday. Here are the aspects I found most interesting:

Marriage of SaaS and Open Source

Most of the panelists do a mixture of traditional Open Source model (software + services) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Seems like this becomes the mainstream business model for Open Source products that are useful for end users/consumers. At Mindquarry, we’ll offer a hosted solution of our Open Source product as well.

Ranga Rangachari (Groundwork Open Source) sees a general move away from the typical use of self-hosted Open Source software within enterprises towards SaaS.

Bill Soward (Adaptive Planning) described that there’s a successful path for lead generation from those who download and try out the freely available Open Source product and then simply buy a subscription for the SaaS offering to use it in production.

Bob Walters (Untangle) made a highly interesting general comment on the “marriage of Open Source and SaaS”: The central issue here is that e.g. a (the?) major SaaS provider, Google, made several great improvements to the Linux kernel but does not give them back to the community. Here, SaaS works against the community spirit of Open Source. GPL v3 is supposed to help avoid this issue.

Community is your main business

Bob Walters made a good point in saying if you miss attracting a developers community, you miss 75% of your business.

Linux will win the mobile market

Dells recent announcement to ship their computers packaged with Ubuntu lead to the question of Linux on the desktop. Michael Sikorsky (Cambrian House Inc.) stated that Linux will definitely win the mobile market, even if it won’t make it on the desktop.

How to provide support for all Linux distributions

Mike Guiterman (SourceFire, the company behind Snort) made a general comment on what the diversity of available Linux distributions means to his Open Source company: They make sure that their product supports the main distributions and have the community provide solutions and services for all other.

Datamation Lists Mindquarry as Bleeding-Edge Open Source Company

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Datamation just published an article entitled Ten Bleeding-Edge Open Source Companies:

Firms that represent the future of open source, from start-ups to established enterprise plays. We look at strategy, funding, and management.

The article also sheds a light on Mindquarry and IMHO, they paint a realistic competitive landscape and identify the main challenges as well as potentials for Mindquarry.

We see a lot of potential in our unique and compelling business model, which can be described as “Web 2.0 meets Open Source”. We (will) offer Mindquarry packaged as

The combination of these is a huge competitive advantage. For example, users of our upcoming SaaS offer can potentially also use Open Source clients for Mindquarry (e.g. to manager their tasks offline) developed by our community (e.g. for their PDA or Mobile Phone).

Sandro and Stephan on Tour in California

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01052007116Just uploaded some pictures of our trip to Monterey, LA, SF and our first day.

Stephan already wrote a bit about our trip and I won’t add anything to that, because I really don’t like blog posts where people write about all the problems they had on their plane or train or car or etc. ride.

You can find the pictures in my Flickr collection for this trip. I will be adding some more pictures in the next few days until we’re back home Sunday – just keep an eye on the collection for updates.

Meet me in SF, LA or Monterey May 1-5

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

Together with Mindquarry’s CEO Stephan Voigt, I’ll be attending Red Herring Spring in Monterey, CA. We’ll fly to LA April 30 and plan to be in Monterey May 1-3. It looks as if we’ll be in San Francisco a few hours during May 1st and definitely at May 4th. Back in LA May 5th to fly back.

If you’re around and would like to meet, drop me a line: sandro [dot] groganz [at] mindquarry [dot] com.

Our New House

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

My wife and me moved to our new house at March 2nd 2007. Find below some pictures and more in my House Building Flickr photo set.

We found the real estate about 1 year before we moved in, around Feb/Mar 2006. It’s at the border of Munderkingen, one of the smallest towns in Germany with roughly 5000 inhabitants. We immediately decided to buy it because of the very calm location and great view.
Real estate (S/E)

Next was to find someone who builds our house. We finally decided to go with Manuel Kirstein Baubetreuung, which was a very wise decision now that I can look back on our successful house building endeavor. Here’s the historic picture showing him, my wife and me after signing the contract (no, no, it’s not us being small, but him being tall).

Signing the contract

In July, the building actually began:

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Of course, just like every German house builder, we had to place a sign that trespassing is prohibited – it felt like claiming my land 🙂

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Our (fabulous!!!) construction manager Erwin Gerber, my father-in-law (who helped us a lot and whom we jokingly used to call “assistant of the construction manager”) and me inspecting the basement:

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The house with the basement and ground floor done:

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A few weeks later, the roof is in place:

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… that’s when we celebrated the topping-out cereomony with craftsmen and neighbours:

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Afterwards, the windows got integrated and a lot of work happened inside. I already wrote about myself setting up a LAN infrastructure in our house. The other thing I did myself was to wall in the bathtub. According to the tiler who later had to fix my mistakes, the result was almost perfect 🙂

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It was quite spectacular when the company (BauGrund Sßd) came who drilled 2x 100m holes for our geothermal heating system:

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With the heating in place, it took only some more weeks to get almost everything done inside to be able to move in. This is a rather new picture of our house from where the terrace will hopefully soon be in place (I am sitting behind the top left window while writing this post – can you spot my monitor’s back?):

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This is the view outside from the top middle room:

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The whole building project worked out very well. We had a good team we could trust (Manuel Kirstein and Erwin Gerber and all the craftsmen). Of course, there were problems, but everyone took care that they get fixed in a good way.

We enjoy living in our new house very much. Every day we realize that the architecture was well thought out. If I remember correctly, we spent more than 4 weeks on figuring out the best architecture before the building started.

It was a huge work and I am happy that it’s done. I spent long nights and weekends on all sorts of tasks and never want to build a house again. Nevertheless, I’d never want to miss the experience, it also taught me a lot about management skills.

Next is the garden, but we’ll take that one easy 😉

Freedom of Collaboration

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Mark Shuttleworth says:

Iâ??ve long believed thereâ??s a general phenomenon that underlies the free software movement. Itâ??s â??volunteer-driven, internet-powered collaborationâ?.

I’d call it “freedom of collaboration”.

This freedom will eventually spill over from public collaborative environments such as public SVN and CVS repositories or Wikipedia to corporate collaborative workspaces, simply because it results in more efficiency and better results. Freedom of collaboration within and between businesses is at the core of what constitutes the Enterprise 2.0.

The aim of Mindquarry’s Open Source collaborative software is, to allow all sorts of knowledge workers in various types of organizations to work just like Open Source developers or Wikipedia editors in modern teams. We bring them the freedom of collaboration. Yep! 🙂

Questions You Ask a PR Agency

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

My search for a PR agency in the USA for Mindquarry has lead to some good results. I am waiting for feedback from some promising potentials. Below is the Q&A I sent to them.

Some of the questions should be answered by your marketing strategy which you hand out to your PR folks. Nevertheless, with a young company like Mindquarry, your marketing strategy is likely to change while you introduce new products and gain new experiences. Hence, I want a PR agency flexible enough not only to shape a story and message with you, but also to keep an eye on how the results of a PR campaign impact your general strategy.

Use the list at your own risk 🙂

Profile of PR Agency

  • Where do you see do Mindquarry and your PR agency fit well together?
  • Why can you help us best to be successful? What’s special about you, what’s your PR “trick”?
  • Do you see critical aspects, anything where you or Mindquarry need to adapt to work together smoothly?
  • How big is your company: How many employees, how many customers?
  • Please name all Open Source clients and your team members who work(ed) for them.
  • Please name your 5 best known customers and your team members who work(ed) for them.

Profile of Mindquarry

  • How would you describe the profile of Mindquarry?
  • What are strengths and weaknesses?
  • How would you position Mindquarry in your PR, what’s the core message?
  • Do you see a large disadvantage in Mindquarry not yet having an office in the USA? Which interim solution would you suggest until the office is in place?

General PR Approach

  • What would be the general PR approach you’d suggest to gain visibility of Mindquarry? Starting with social marketing / community evangelism then moving towards “traditional” PR? Or mixing it right from the start?
  • Please list the minimum actions you would perform to ensure the success of Mindquarry PR.
  • How long will it take, to achieve the goal?

Focus Groups

  • Please give us an idea which focus groups you would address and the reasons why?
  • Also, who are the focus groups you would leave out, why?

Channels and Collaterals

  • Which channels would you address?
  • Which magazines/journalists would you approach? Where do you want to see a news or article appear?
  • Are there in general conferences or trade fairs we should not miss?
  • Should the PR be in sync with our appearance at events or is this less important?
  • Any bloggers you have in mind whom you could ask to write about Mindquarry?
  • Do you think http://www.mindquarry.com is ready for the upcoming PR campaigns? What would you urgently change?
  • Do you plan to make use of http://www.mindquarry.com within your PR? How?
  • What kind of marketing collaterals (e.g. brochures) should Mindquarry provide or adjust for your PR?

Resources and Costs

  • How many of your team members would be involved in Mindquarry PR?
  • Will we have a dedicated point of contact? How much of her time would this person allocate to us? Who would assist her?
  • What kind of help would you need from Mindquarry?
  • A rough estimate: how much would the minimal PR cost?

Controlling

  • How would you benchmark the success or failure of your Mindquarry PR?
  • How would you correlate it to sales figures (conversion)?

User-Centered Design

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment
Sketch of Mindquarry 1.1 GUI

My colleagues at Mindquarry have done a great job in planning the new graphical user interface (GUI) of the upcoming version 1.1 of Mindquarry Collaboration Server. Instead of long fights about believes on what users really want, they simply did usability testing.

Mindquarry’s Chief Architect Alexander Klimetschek blogged about the approach and the results. His slides about User-Centered Design (UCD) for Mindquarry provide a good summary.

That made me think about those Open Source projects with Web- or Desktop-based GUIs out there who think they can survive without usability tests. Maybe they think that their community will provide enough valuable usability feedback to them? I think this is a wrong assumption, because that community will most likely consist of developers.

Developers are patient and used to software quirks. Quite the opposite, end users are impatient. You usually got one shot lasting 15 minutes to convince them that your software is useful. Of course, developers can provide indirect end user feedback, because they set up software for them. Yet, that’s like a Chinese whisper.

Hence, go out and ask your potential users what they think. This is the most direct feedback you can get and the best and fastest approach towards a useful software product.

Major Open Source Event in Romania: eLiberatica

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

Good ‘ol friend Zak pointed me to a major Open Source event in Romania: eLiberatica.

Intro blurb from their site:

The eLiberatica Conference brings community leaders from around the world to talk about the hottest topics in FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) movement demonstrating the advantages of adopting, using and developing Open Source and Free Software solutions.

Some of the stars will be speaking there: Rasmus Lerdorf, Monty Widenius, Brian Behlendorf, Aleksander Farstad and of course Zak himself. The sessions and workshops cover various interesting topics, they all are in English. The registration fee is quite moderate: 249 EUR and even less if you book now.

If you’re close, don’t miss it from May 18th-19th in BraÅ?ov, Romania.

Mindquarry Seeks PR Agency in USA

Sandro Groganz 6 Comments

The major goal of Mindquarry’s marketing strategy for 2007 is to reach a high visibility in the North American (NA) market. To achieve this goal, Mindquarry seeks a PR agency located in the USA.

Requirements:

  • located in USA
  • record of successful PR campaigns for Open Source companies
  • excellent contacts to leading IT media and stakeholders
  • staff member(s) with good reputation in IT blogosphere

Matches with your PR agency? Please contact me: sandro [dot] groganz [at] mindquarry [dot] com.

About Mindquarry

Mindquarry was founded in the summer of 2006 by three graduate students of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The founders set out to build better tools for knowledge workers,the result – Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software for file sharing, tasks management and Wiki editing. For a fast startup, Mindquarry got financial backing through the Hasso Plattner Ventures; Hasso Plattner being a co-founder of SAP. More information about Mindquarry is available on the Internet at www.mindquarry.com.